Carding is a known process of opening, cleaning, straightening, and aligning fibers.
Known carding processes separate fibers from each other, lays them parallel, and condenses them into singular untwisted bunches or strands. The carding process can be done by hand or by machines. If done by means of machines, the fiber working components are formed either by needles or by saw toothed steel wires known as carding wires or card clothing wires.
It is likewise known to use carding machinery to make nonwoven webs, such as used for the manufacture of disposable wipes, disposable garments, disposable filters, such as hospital masks.
It is also known to process fibers, including the manufacturing of nonwoven webs, on high speed carding machinery of the type which uses cylinders on which carding wires have been wound to form toothed cylinders having hundreds of rows of toothed carding wires having, in total, thousands of teeth.
Such known rollers are termed, for example, main, doffer, randomizer, and condenser rollers.
Known carding wires, and the use thereof in high speed high volume carding machinery, include carding wire manufactured and sold by NV BEKAERT SA, which can be found at http://www.bekaert.com/cardingsolutions/ and www.bekaert.com. BEKAERT carding wire, such as BEKAERT SIROLOCK® brand carding wire, and BEKAERT WEBLOCK® brand carding wire. These are merely two (2) examples of known BEKAERT brand carding wires.
Known patents include:
U.S. Pat. No. 4,398,318 to Ashworth, III, entitled “Card Clothing for Carding Machine Elements”; and
U.S. Pat. No. 4,211,583 to Eadie et al., entitled “Card-clothing Wire”.
Known carding wires are unsatisfactory for the high speed production of known nonwoven webs, such as used for wipes and disposable garments, as described above.
In high speed production, the higher machine speeds; i.e., line speeds, the known card wiring and carding wires tend to produce nonwoven webs which have diminished strength in a crosswise direction that is crosswise relative to the machine direction of the carding machine during production.